The Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any direction. By contrast, a Darwinian science of human nature supports traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The Freiburg Workshop (6): The Evolutionary Science of Classical Liberalism

At the Freiburg workshop, I restated my argument that we have at least
twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature, and that a free and
open society as promoted by classical liberalism gives individuals the fullest
freedom to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires.If the good is the desirable, then we can
judge the classically liberal society to be better than those societies that do
not allow individuals the same freedom to satisfy their natural desires.

In his paper for the workshop, Jan Schnellenbach (Economics, Walter Eucken Institute, Freiburg) contended that I
was wrong about this, because we must make trade-offs between these natural
desires, and the trade-offs made by liberal policies are no more closer to
human nature than the trade-offs made by illiberal policies.“In general,” he wrote, “our many natural
dispositions need not be mutually consistent, and the weights between them are
likely to differ between individuals."He claimed that “evolution likely endows individuals with a variety of
heterogeneous traits and dispositions, which in turn implies a variety in
policy preferences.”

But
here he misses my point that it’s precisely this heterogeneity in how
individuals rank their natural desires that makes liberal policies superior to
illiberal policies, because while illiberal policies impose coercively a single
ranking of desires, liberal policies do not impose a single ranking of desires
on all. In a liberal, largely open society, individuals are free to choose how
to rank their natural desires, as long as this respects the equal liberty of others in their ranking.Thus,
liberal policies respect the natural heterogeneity of individuals, while
illiberal policies do not.

As
indicated by Victor Vanberg at the workshop, Hayek makes this same point when he
distinguishes between two kinds of “social planning.”Illiberal planning organizes society by “a
system of specific orders and prohibitions,” while liberal planning establishes
“a rational system of law, under the rule of which people are free to follow
their preferences.”

I
largely agreed with what Vanberg said about Hayek and the need for
“evolution within constraints.”I also
agreed with him in criticizing Hayek’s suggestion that the market order requires
a suppression of our natural human desires.This is what I have identified as Hayek’s Freudian theory of human
evolution, in which civilization requires the repression of our evolved human
instincts.Here is where Hayek’s
argument for liberalism becomes incoherent.

If
a liberal society is so painful because it requires the suppression of our
deepest natural instincts, why does it succeed?And if a socialist society satisfies our deepest natural instincts, why
does it fail?

As I have indicated in some previous posts, I
see the same incoherence in the “mismatch theory” of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.Last June, at the meeting of the Mont Pelerin
Society in the Galapagos Islands, Cosmides and Tooby indicated their agreement
with Hayek on this point.At times, they
seemed to say that Karl Marx was right about the “primitive communism” of
hunter-gatherers, but at other times, they seemed to say that Marx was wrong,
because even hunter-gatherers show only conditional sharing or reciprocation,
and therefore their sharing is not indiscriminate.Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides seemed to agree
with John Locke and Adam Smith in seeing trading behavior in hunter-gatherers
that would provide the natural basis for the modern commercial society.

Understanding
our evolution as moral animals requires that we understand the complex
interaction between our moral nature,
our moral culture, and our moral judgment.This interaction of nature, culture, and
judgment was a theme in the paper presented by Margaret Shabas (Philosophy, University of British Columbia). Schabas said that John Stuart Mill “believed that some of our traits are
instinctive while others, our moral sense for example, are acquired.But they emanate out of our intrinsic nature
and in that sense are organic to our species.” She then quoted from Mill’s Utilitarianism: “Like the other acquired
capacities above referred to [speech and reason], the moral faculty, if not
part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it; capable, like them, in a
certain small degree, of springing up spontaneously; and susceptible of being
brought by cultivation to a high degree of development.”

In
his Descent of Man, Darwin quotes
from this same passage in Mill’s Utilitarianism,
which Darwin finds contradictory.Darwin
argues that human morality is rooted in evolved social instincts.He finds Mill confusing on this point,
because Mill seems to say that morality both is and is not naturally
instinctive.

Darwin
and Mill are actually in agreement, I think, in seeing that natural moral
instincts are necessary but not sufficient for the full development of moral
life.For Darwin, the first step in the evolution of morality
is to have the social instincts that “lead an animal to take pleasure in the
society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to
perform various services for them.” But this is only the first step.The other steps include the mental capacity for deliberation, language
that expresses social praise and blame, and social habituation.

While we commonly separate nature and nurture or nature and art, animal
nature—including human moral nature—must be nurtured if it is to reach its
natural completion, and this nurturing of our nature includes both cultural
learning and individual judgment.That’s
why I say that Darwinian anthropology moves through three interacting
levels.Human nature constrains but does
not determine human culture.And human
nature and human culture jointly constrain but do not determine human judgment.

The issue of whether liberal democratic regimes conform better to the constraints of evolved human
nature than do illiberal authoritarian regimes is an empirical question.Albert Somit and Steven Peterson have argued
that liberal democracies require an egalitarian social structure that is
contrary to our evolved human inclination to a hierarchical social structure in
which the submissive many defer to the dominant few.

Gregory Levit (History of Science, King's College & Jena University) criticized this argument in his paper for the workshop. I agree with him. But he doesn’t see the fundamental problem
with the position of Somit and Peterson.

They
assume that liberal democracy must be completely egalitarian, with no hierarchy
at all.If this were true, then the
record of history would show that there has never been a liberal democracy,
because every society has some differences in social rank.And, indeed, I have argued that there is a
natural desire for social ranking.

Levit
cites Christopher Boehm’s book Hierarchy
in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.But he doesn’t notice that Boehm argues
against Somit and Peterson in claiming—rightly I think—that even in foraging
societies, there is a hierarchy, but it’s an “egalitarian hierarchy,” in which
subordinates use sanctions to restrain those with propensities to
dominate.Boehm then shows how modern
liberal democracies can be interpreted as egalitarian hierarchies, with a
formal or informal system of checks and balances that allows for “a moderate
degree of leadership” without exploitative rule of dominants over
subordinates.Here, then, modern liberal
democracies conform to the natural human dispositions shaped in the
evolutionary history of hunter-gatherers.

In
the evolution of hunter-gatherers, we can also see the evolution of social
order as based on sympathy, which is rightly understood by Adam Smith as “our
fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.”Smith shows us how the moral order of society can be explained through
our natural desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments.

In his paper for the workshop, Alain Marciano (Economics, University of Montpellier) made a good argument for how Smith’s sentimentalist psychology of
sympathy supports the liberal understanding of how social order can emerge as a
largely spontaneous, self-regulatory order.

Marciano
also showed, however, that Smith recognized the limits of sympathy as extended
to strangers or people outside one’s own group, and so he saw that economic
exchange might need to depend mostly on self-interest rather than benevolence.

Modern
evolutionary psychology has largely confirmed Smith’s understanding of how our
nature as both self-regarding and other-regarding animals supports the social
orders of moral and economic cooperation.

And, thus, once again, we see , as I argued at the workshop, that Darwinian science supports classical liberalism
by showing that Adam Smith was right about almost everything.